/* HACK: refactor in next version */

competition

A month ago Kwwika, a real-time data streaming service provider annonced a competition to build a mash up that uses their World Cup 2010 Twitter streams. I’ve decided to enter the competition and visualize the stream of tweets in a fun and engaging way. As the competition closed on 11th July, my entry was selected as one of the winners!

My entry, Tweet For Your Team shows the tweets of the two teams simultaneously. It measures the live intensity of the tweets (how many are written per minute for each team) and also analyzes their mood by matching keywords and using simple rules to decide whether a tweet carries positive or negative emotions for the team.

The entry also allows visitors to get involved and cheer for or against their team with a single click sending a shout visible to other users off the application. See this post on further details on the application functionality.

Winners of the competition were announced just before the World Cup 2010 final and I was happy to see my entry being selected one of the two winners. As the judging panel wrote in their summary:“Gergely created a really engaging application that you could easily sit and watch and interact with during any live World Cup match.” And “The performance of the application is really impressive considering tweet rates for Spain alone have been seen to hit 3500 tweets per minute.”

You can read more about the application in the following previous posts:

I’ve created TweetForYourTeam just a week ago and have just added a major update with a couple of fun features.

Cheer By a Single Click

In the original version of TweetForYourTeam one was able to engage in cheering for or against a team by sending a tweet to Twitter. In the current update an easier method has been implemented. Under each teams two buttons have been placed that allow one to cheer for or against the team by hitting the button.

Whenever one sends a cheer (or anti-cheer), a cool animation happens on the screen. At the same time this cheer is sent back to the server and immediately appears on all other users’ screen real-time, using Kwwika’s real time notification streaming. So whenever you cheer, everyone else gets to see the same effect go off on their screen.

This World Cup has been exciting for me not just because of the great games but also because during the group stages I’ve been building a cool real time spectator monitoring application for it: Tweet For Your Team (powered by Kwwika real time data services).

What does it do?

The application streams tweets live from the two teams playing live or playing the next game (using the Kwwika service). It also shows the live score on the top (provided by Opta), so even if you’re not in front of a telly, you can be aware of it. Now, for the fun part…

The app monitors the tweet intensity, that is the number of tweets per minute for each side. Hours before the game this value is typically around 5-10/minute, right before the game it’s usually at least 300/minute and from there it pretty well reflects how nerve wracking the game is. The highest number I’ve experienced up to the semi finals. was around 3500/minute for Spain, when they shot – and missed – the second penalty against Paraguay in the quarter finals.

Tweet intensity is an interesting indicator, but an even more useful one is the mood meter. The application tries to evaluate the mood of each tweet coming in and decide whether it is more of a positive message (“yaaay!!”) or a negative one (“boooo!”). The tweets are colored according to this: red ones mean negative, green ones positive and yellow is neutral (or at least the application couldn’t decide).

Tweet intensity tends to pretty well reflect on the game: usually when a team is scored a goal it tends to go down… though it’s hard to predict by how much – sometimes the fans just keep sending positive messages to the team even after their team has gotten behind!Read More…

It’s been a week since we’ve come home from the Innovation Accelerator in Mountain View. This is the trip that we’ve won on the Microsoft Imagine Cup in Paris, last summer, as special prize. It’s been a great week – we’ve attended numerous priceless sessions and gained a peek into the entrepreneurial life in Silicon Valley. In the end of the week all the teams presented their projects to three venture capitlists – and of the six participant teams (Australia, France, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa and us, Hungary) we were the ones receiving the highest ratings!

Among the sessions were presentations on startups Liftopia, Ribbit, Zoosk, 3Scale and some others. We visited the Plug & Play Centre – an incubator for about 200 startups – a place that seems like lots of fun to work at! Of course there were some Microsoft sessions as well, we had a networking event and all key phases of starting up a company were covered in a presentation series. It’s incredible how much I’ve heard over the week..!

The Hungarian Team on the Innovation Accelerator

Before the Innovation Accelerator we’ve taken a week long road trip in California and Nevada. If you’re interested, you can read our blog in Hungarian on the trip here.

I still can’t believe it but it’s true: with team Digitalmania, Hungary we’ve won 3rd place on theMicrosoft Imagine Cupworld finals in Paris and were one of the 6 teams to receive the Innovation Accelerator prize in the main category, Software Design!! It’s amazing… we are also the first Hungarian team to make it to the top 6 teams on the world finals as well!

Presenting at the finals, in the Louvre

The whole competition started a few months ago when we’ve decided to enter the Imagine Cup competiton. We’ve managed to win the Hungarian national round which made us qualify for the world finals among with 60 other teams across the globe. The world finals took place for 6 days. The firs few days there were qualifiers from where 12 teams advanced to the semi-finals. After another round 6 of the 12 teams were selected for the grand final. The qualifiers and semi-finals were closed to the audience, whereas the grand final was in front of about 2,000 people in the Louvre! I never expected to be presenting in front of this many people!

The Win The Web 24 hours coding competition was held last Saturday. The competition was organized by Microsoft Hungary and during the 24 hours teams of 3 had to complete a larger and three smaller web projects using any technology they preferred. I entered with two of my colleagues from work.

The main task was to create a website that tracks movements of truck drivers throughout Europe. We were given sample GPS coordinates of about 30 drivers with reports every 5 minutes in a months interval and had to visualize this information, make it searchable and implement the most we could of a list of about 30 requirements.

We decided to use ASP.NET, WCF, Silverlight and Bing maps with the Javascript API to solve the task. The competiton started at 10am on Saturday and the hours seemed to fly by too fast. I was developing route visualization with Bing maps and tried to work around limitiations of the Javascript API (e.g. that only paths of about 25 steps can be plotted on it) as well as building website functionality and a bit of Silverlight.

Unfortunately we only implemented about 60% of the functionality required. Because of this we weren’t hoping of any prize – however to our delight we were awarded IT Secure’s special prize for the most innovative user interface! And after the award ceremony I went home and slept a good 15 hours

The Imagine Cup Hungary finals were held last week at Microsoft headquarters in Budapest. This year’s topic was Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment and there were multiple categories one could enter (including algorithm, games, short film and some other). We’ve entered the “main” category, Software Design. In this category the winners of the national round qualify for the world finals held in Paris this year. And yes… we’ve won and will be representing Hungary in the world finals!!

The Idea

In theSoftware Design category teams of maxium 4 have to create a project for the theme of the competition utilizing Microsoft technologies. We’ve spent weeks brainstorming with what we could develop for this year’s theme and finally came up with a water saving irrigation system. The motivation driving this idea was that we learned that 80% of all sweet water used goes towards irrigation compared to only 7% of sweet water used by households! So if we could save 5% on irrigation that would be equivalent of saving 50% on household water usage and would have a huge impact.